Over the last six or so months, I’ve been cobbling together the parts to eventually build a PC. As of late last week, I’ve got something functional enough to be useful– and have thus begun moving my files and trying to find the best applications for me needs. Here’s what I’ve been happy with so far:
* OS: Ubuntu 7.04
* Music, Audio Podcast tuner: Banshee
* Photos: F-Spot
* Web: Firefox
* Video: VLC, Miro (podcasts), Totem
* WebDev: Eclipse + PyDev + Subclipse + Aptana
Other nice things: Google Earth, IEs 4 Linux, Flash Player 9, gltron
Not everything worked perfectly– I had to fight to get my wireless card to work, drop to the command line to clean up both my iTunes and iPhoto libraries before ANY program would import them correctly, and use an unsupported version of the NVIDIA driver because the one in Ubuntu’s software repository doesn’t support my card. There haven’t been any problems yet that I haven’t been able to work through with some research.
**Why?**
It was about time to move to a desktop machine as my home-workspace– I was tired of small screens, and of tired of my circa-2005 iBook going into oh-shit-meltdown mode (when the fan switches into high-gear and it sounds like a dust-buster) when I tried to do something like run Eclipse , Postgres, and Firefox at the same time. I realized that most of what I use my home computer for was either:
* Web-based (Gmail, etc)
* Cross platform and/or open source (Eclipse, Miro, VLC, Firefox, Python)
* Easy to find replacements for (simple text and graphics editors)
I have no particular ill-will towards Apple, but buying a desktop mac didn’t make much sense given the above. I AM very glad I did the DRM-purge a year ago, so the only files I have that are unusable on Linux are Audible.com books.
**Also**: I got some good ideas from Sam’s blog.
3 Comments
May I suggest Exaile for your audio needs? Also, Picassa for Linux works perfectly. It’s a revision behind Windows though, but I hated the timeline view of F-Spot and was thrilled that I could keep using Picassa.
I have a bit of iTunes-bred laziness where I don’t want to have to manage the files in my music collection by hand. Banshee does (for me) the right thing– an imported song is placed in a Artist/Album directory for me. A quick look at Exaile seems to indicate that it works like Rhythmbox and Amarok, where it just continually watches one or more ‘blessed’ folders for new songs.
I am playing with Picasa, though.
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